Jury: MP3tunes founder must pay $41 million for copyright violations

It's Michael Robertson's second feud with record labels and his second big loss.

Michael Robertson, an entrepreneur who has been waging legal feuds against the music industry for more than a decade now, has been ordered to pay $41 million to a record label that sued him.

The record label EMI sued MP3tunes back in 2007, and the case finally went to a jury last week in New York federal court. The jury found MP3tunes, and Robertson personally, liable for copyright violations.

A separate damages trial ended yesterday, with the jury issuing a verdict of around $41 million. That's an estimate, because the decision was a "complex, lengthy" verdict that will take the lawyers until next week to calculate precisely, according to a Reuters report on the outcome of the trial.

MP3tunes was founded in 2005, along with a related site called Sideload.com; both were sued by EMI in 2007. MP3tunes went bankrupt, largely because of the litigation, in 2012. While it was active, the site acted as a music storage service that allowed users to access their music from anywhere. It was a pioneer in the field when it was founded, but in recent years Google, Amazon, and Apple have all founded music-specific cloud services. However, all three of those tech giants made some form of copyright license payment to music labels.

Robertson, by contrast, was outspoken in his belief that music fans should be able to store their music in the cloud, move it between devices, and access it without paying any kind of licensing fee. He's now lost that battle on two occasions, however. An earlier site, MP3.com, also fell victim to music industry litigation.

At issue in the trial were 2,100 songs. The accusations in the case included allegations that Robertson had used Sideload to upload unauthorized music to his personal account. The $41 million verdict comes out to around $19,500 per infringed song.

Robertson's lawyer told Reuters he plans to appeal the outcome of the trial. A lawyer for EMI declined to comment on the verdict.